Close as we are, what can we suppose of the midnight sky
or the moon that looms over the fields beyond them?
Here at arm's length, the two lie crumpled in
each other's arms, in an ox-bow trench
behind the lines of Stalingrad.
Near one, a hand-wrought iron ball from
an earlier civil war, handfuls of Saltines,
letters from his father, who is somewhere
back in a cattle valley of the Ukraine.
What was their sacrifice or bravery,
to die for a bunker that housed a brewery?
One of the letters even says that beer
goes bad in a no-man's-land.
From down in the soggy bottom
of this foxhole, you feel the cold
of underearth, and see that clouds by day
and stars by night are all there is.
If this wasn't enough, we see that life
itself is naught, like the cut-off
ox-bow of a river, when the men
can't rise and return to their homes.

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